


seventy years

by vexedcer



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Insomnia, M/M, NOT A LOT i rlly curbed it for this piece, Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, also i talked abt jace's death again bc when do i not, discussions/references to captain america: the first avenger, some introspection, trust me it makes sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 16:42:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12536372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vexedcer/pseuds/vexedcer
Summary: He pushes his hands into the sheets and the numbers three twenty-seven flash up harsh when he unlocks his unearthed phone, still open on his messages. Simon’s name is tantalising, almost, inviting some sort of interaction and he doesn’t know what kind.(Jace can't sleep.)





	seventy years

**Author's Note:**

> ayyyy this fic was inspired by [this post](https://residentqueer.tumblr.com/post/166562685660). i talk,,,, a weird amount about captain america: the first avenger in this but it's mainly bc of "you dont get to talk to me, captain america" bc honestly as a community, we dont talk about that line ENOUGH, also steve rogers was my main guy for like two years and i love him.
> 
> the title was inspired by, you guessed it, captain america and his 70 year nap in the arctic bc im the worst™. also! there is a vague mention of nazis in this (bc again,,, captain america, ww2 and simon is jewish) and its implied simon explains ww2 and the holocaust to jace but its vague so if ud rather avoid altogether, pls do. 
> 
> otherwise, enjoy!!

The only light in the room is the sliver of white creeping out from under the bathroom door. The rest of the room is shrouded in darkness, the furniture hazy almost indistinguishable shapes. His wardrobe is open and the inside is the darkest black in the room, a void in the wall with no texture of hanging clothes or messily laced combat boots caked in New York sludge and demon guts.

He turns over. Beats his pillow. Rearranges his comforter. Turns over again.

The darkness should be comforting; it's peaceful and unstimulating and the perfect environment for sleeping, except his brain has turned on like a late night channel on static noise. There’s nothing happening but it’s still live and on air, pointless and numb.

Jace flops onto his back, one hand above his head and the other resting limp on his torso over the blanket. The ceiling is one uniform grey in the darkness of the room, completely uninteresting and yet the most enticing thing he could stare at in the middle of the night.

It shouldn't be this hard to sleep; he got up early this morning to train with Alec and then he was gone until the evening with Izzy on a mission and then he was on patrol until late - so he has no right to be awake right now. If anything, he should be exhausted. He would have been, before.

Before everything. Before Clary came swinging into their lives with her badly aimed guns blazing and Valentine swooped in, knife in hand -

Admittedly, he's had trouble sleeping after - being dead. He feels weird, and empty in a ringing kind of way, like derelict warehouses and fire damaged rooms.  Like every thought or bodily function is echoing inside him, everything about him is too small for his shell now.

He rolls over again, cradling the pillow with one arm under his head and the other by his face. He immediately has to turn over onto his other side because the first way, he had his back to the door and, well -

Some habits die hard.

It's about three am, he guesses roughly. He has to be up in four hours to prepare for the day and he knows that if he doesn't drop off right now this moment, he's looking at four cups of coffee and that unnerving buzz under his skin that he hates.

He moves on to his back again, restless and uncomfortable, the sheets tangled around his legs and waist like a boobytrap. He feels exhausted in a non-physical kind of way, like he needs a break from everything to just watch that damn cop show Simon introduced him to last week - a _sitcom_ , he called it, whatever that means -

The thought of Simon makes him want to turn over again and cover his head with one of the pillows he’s kicked onto the floor while tossing and turning. The two of them have been forced into hanging around together since there’s been a billion counsel meetings in the last two weeks about some rising problem, something to do with vampire-werewolf boundaries and a few incidents of fighting between individual members or something.

It’s not that Jace doesn’t _care_ about Downworld politics, he _does -_ it’s just been so hard to pay attention to everything since he’s basically running on fumes a lot of the time, that bone tiredness kept at bay until he stops to breath for a second. Alec has talked about it enough times for him to get the jist, but anything more than the barest details are a mystery to Jace.

That’s why Simon is staying in the Institute tonight. There’s a meeting at five am, the only time Raphael had free during the darker hours to make the meeting. According to Simon, he’s been swamped with both these recent incidents and an influx of fledglings that Camille had turned while she was freed. That’s a huge reason Raphael let the Daylighter thing go - it’s all hands on deck right now, and whether the truce is a temporary thing or not is unknown but Jace knows that Simon is happy to be back with the clan. Vampire relationship dynamics can be weird, Jace thinks.

Jace rolls over one more time, reaching for his phone without even thinking about it. He stares blearily at the screen when the sudden brightness that imprints on his conelias fades. He scrolls through his messages, and pauses at Simon’s name.

Things with him and Simon have been good, civil - almost _fun_ , and he’s starting to resent the fact that he ripped on Simon for so long just because he was clueless (at the time) and super nerdy (all the time). Some of the things that Simon likes, Jace _also_ likes; _Brooklyn Nine Nine,_ comic books, _Star Wars,_ that kind of shit.

At the same time, though, they’ve also had some moments of vulnerability and that - that is what scares him the most. Jace won’t ever admit to another living person when he is _truly_ fearful of something because he wasn’t raised that way, _emotions cloud judgement_ . They had to watch _Captain America: The First Avenger_ twice because of those moments of feeling too raw and exposed.

The first time round, they got to Erskine asking Cap - Cap, who is thin and frail looking and sickly, and Jace doesn’t understand why Simon compared him the man on the screen that first fateful time they met - Erskine asking Steve if he wanted to kill Nazis.

Now, Jace isn’t oblivious to mundane history. He had to learn about it briefly when he was studying Shadowhunter history, how the World Wars’ affected the running of multiple major Institutes - London, Moscow, Fukuoka - but that was a long time ago now and he’s forgotten most of the details. He can’t quite remember what the Nazis did and -

Simon had stilled when he asked, and Jace was sure from the look on his face that if he had the ability to pale further, he would have. He looked away and had taken a deep breath and explained in as few words as possible about the badges and the camps and the horrors, his voice almost (but not quite) emotionless, little breaks here and there while he gathered himself before continuing.

They sat in silence when he finished, the words heavy in the air. Jace suggested that they watch the next episode of _Brooklyn Nine Nine,_ and Simon readily agreed, uncharacteristically quiet. He eventually succumbed to slumber against Jace’s side, and if Jace slipped an arm around his shoulders, for a moment, while he slept like he was dead _(_ _ha_ _)_ just to feel the reassuring weight of him pressed up against his body, there was no one around to know.

Currently, Jace rolls onto his side again, on _his_ side of the bed, and _since when did he have a side in his own bed?_ and curls inwards, phone lost to the sheets as the screen turns black from inactivity. The second time they watched _Captain America: The First Avenger_ , they watched the whole thing. Simon chatted and inserted random knowledge throughout the entirety of the movie, much more himself this time around, but it’s towards the end something finally gets at Jace.

Steve decides to put the plane down in the water, kill himself for the good of the world, and Jace - him and Steve are not the same; he is not the morally uncompromising larger than life optimist that Simon compared him to way back when. But still when Steve plummets towards the ice, promising his girl a date of dancing, he feels a niggle, a _something_ in the back of his mind of how Clary leaned over him, dying, blood flowing from the stab wound in his heart and how he told her he loved her even though he almost definitely knew he didn’t. Steve knew he wouldn’t make the date but promised anyways - he told Clary he loved her even though he doesn’t.

He pushes his hands into the sheets and the numbers three twenty-seven flash up harsh when he unlocks his unearthed phone, still open on his messages. Simon’s name is tantalising, almost, inviting some sort of interaction and he doesn’t know what kind.

Jace is not Captain America and his shield is not indestructible and Simon is not Agent Carter and they are not plummeting towards the ice or pleading over a radio. They can make their own story.

He types _u awake?_ like he doesn’t already know that Simon is whiling away his time until the council meeting in the spare room the Institute supplied him. Simon’s little grey typing bubble pops up and then stops and then starts again.

 _Yeah,_ he replies, and then _Why are you still up?_

 _cant sleep,_ Jace sends back, like that explains why he’s texting Simon of all people at three-thirty in the morning. Or maybe it’s not even something Simon would question anymore.

 _Come sleep with me,_ the next message says.

_Uhh I meant like,,,_

_You can come to my room if you want_

_And if you fall asleep, that’s fine_

Jace can’t help but smile - Simon is one of those people who type exactly how they talk; when he reads the messages, he can hear Simon saying them in his head clear as day. All of those unsure feelings from before wash away, put back into their neat little storage boxes where they go when Jace isn’t thinking about Simon.

_be there in a second_

He foregoes putting on his shirt and socks, but scoops his pillow up into his arms like a child with their teddy bear. The Institute is quiet and weirdly still around him as he walks, dim with the lamps lit softly above his head. He hasn’t done this in a long time - when he first came to the Institute and found a brother in Alec, sometimes he’d sneak into his room and crawl into his bed. Sometimes it was because of nightmares, sometimes it was because of loneliness.

He knocks even though he knows Simon is expecting him, and waits for his quiet voice to admit him entrance, pillow still cradled in his arms. The room is softly lit, cosy in a way that Jace has never found the Institute to be. There’s a book on Simon’s lap - a graphic novel, he thinks. Simon looks at him with a kind of wide eyed expression, but Jace just flops down onto the empty side of the bed on his stomach, his own pillow under his head.

“Can’t sleep?” Simon asks quietly, and Jace makes an affirmative grunt. “Any reason in particular?”

“Don’t know,” he mumbles, “Just can’t turn my brain off.” Simon hums in response.

They’re quiet then, just sitting in a comfortable silence, the pages of Simon’s book swishing at they turn. The soft light from the side table lamps casts an orange glow to the room, already much more inviting than the flat greys of before. He thinks he might actually be able to sleep tonight, which sounds like a blessing. He’s already starting to feel much looser, like that background whirring in his mind is finally powering down, lying in Simon Lewis’ temporary bed. His bed and this bed are exactly the same - there's a uniformity to the room designs in the Institute but somehow this mattress feels perfect in contrast to how his only felt empty.

“What does that rune do?” Simon asks quietly, the pages still for the minute previous to the question. Simon must have been looking at his bare back for that time, enough so that his curiosity got the better of him. The idea of Simon watching him, looking at him, sends a feeling shooting up his spin like a spark but it’s muted by the slow approach of sleep.

“Which one?” he says, cataloguing the ones on his back in his head. His thoughts are slow moving though and Simon’s finger is tracing the lines of the rune before he can get through them all.

“This one,” Simon tells him, the pad of his finger cool and soft on his skin. He can’t repress the shiver that follows, and Simon pulls his hand away like he’s been burnt. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to -”

“It’s fine,” Jace rumbles. “I don’t mind.”

Simon’s hand returns, more than one finger now but hesitant and light like he’s frightened of breaking Jace. “What does this one do?"

Jace focuses on Simon touch, concentrating on the shape and position. “Precision rune,” he says when he finally figures it out. “It helps with focus and aim.” Simon’s hand does one more path along the main body of the shape before it pulls away and despite Simon always being cold, he feels colder when the hand retreats.

The air feels heavier than before, intimate, but something in Jace’s heart is telling him not to shy away. He just lays there and lets himself be wrapped up in the warm feeling that starts in his heart and reaches outwards.

“What are you reading?” he asks, because he can sense that Simon isn’t accepting this new atmosphere as easily as he has.

 _The Death of Captain America_ , Simon tells him, and Jace can’t help but be humoured in his own mind. He is not the Captain, still, and he never will be, but it’s dark that Simon would be reading it - assumably rereading it - the night Jace crawls into his bed. Simon rambles off with the same usual vigor, just quieter and softer and somehow sweeter, giving the details others would just skip over like he really wants Jace to understand the gravity of the story.

The noise is the perfect lullaby to fall asleep to, not because he’s bored, but because he feels safe. Simon’s regard for the Captain is clear in his voice, and Jace thinks, distantly as his mind moves towards unconsciousness, that he wants Simon to talk about him the same way.

**Author's Note:**

> that was a ride. im not completely happy with this honestly but id rather post it and get responses i can use constructively, so. also fun fact, like simon i apparently also text how i talk? anyways thank u so much for reading!!
> 
> [my main blog](http://vexedcer.tumblr.com/) [my writing blog](http://residentqueer.tumblr.com/) \- come say hi!


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